Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Child of destiny II

I've been thinking about particular stains people can leave upon you and the choices you make, despite physical distance. The presence of a particular person who makes a profound impact upon your life can exercise control over decisions you make for years and years to come. The idea of 'destiny' came up in class today in the context of 'art as destiny'. Is destiny a chain reaction of exposures to people, things and experiences that force us along a certain path? We shy away from bad experiences with people, places and times and is this very act of shying away what determines the happenings of our lives?

This could be put more eloquently however I think the stains people inadvertently display through choices they make are really interesting. What gives me the most information about a person is observing the results of their decisions. I think the hardest stains to remove are those left by people who physically move in and out of your life. In a sense they exist in two spaces, in your mind and in reality. When the reality of a person moves away from you, the person in your mind becomes their predominate presence from your perspective. It is this person's existence in your mind that influences all those telling decisions I was talking about. For me, when an influential person in my life distances themselves from me physically, the presence of them in my mind exercises even more control over my decisions than them in reality. Is this because their existence in my mind is actually just ME and MY desires? Oh dear!

I'll leave it at that because this has begun to make absolutely no sense. On a lighter note when writing this post I listened to Patti Smith's 'Kimberly' on repeat. I feel like some misplaced Joan of Arc and the cause is you lookin' up at me... Oh baby, I remember when you were born, It was dawn and the storm settled in my belly. And I rolled in the grass and I spit out the gas, and I lit a match and the void went flash, and the sky split and the planets hit - Balls of jade dropped and existence stopped, stopped, stop, stop. Little sister, the sky is falling, I don't mind, I don't mind. Little sister, the fates are calling on you.